“Dead!” she said. “O my God! What will we do!”
Chapter XXXIV
THE REMAINDER OF THAT day, Thursday August the twenty-fifth, is a sort of nightmare to remember.
I had notified the police of Mrs. MacMullen’s visit, and then followed the usual long hours when nothing seemed to happen. Indeed when everything was over and we knew that our killer would kill no more, I was to hear Herbert Dean say that a big crime case was like a war: a few dramatic moments and then hours and days of surface quiet and patient underground digging.
So far the Crescent as a whole knew nothing of Holmes’s death. No boy selling extras ever intruded on our sacred privacy, and both Mother and I had been asked to let the police make the announcement when they were ready. The result was an extremely peaceful if hot August afternoon, with Eben once again systematically cutting the grass, and our housemaids or parlormaids or butlers, as the case might be, quite cheerfully doing the usual Thursday silver cleaning.
To them I dare say the crimes were over and the excitement ended. Whatever they knew or suspected, the curtain was down and they were ready to go about their business again. It had been exciting, but it was not their play. They had been interested and terrified spectators, but no more than that. The result was that for all our bars and locks, for all our guards at night and the incessant clamor of the press for action on the part of the police as to the Crescent Place murderer, there was a definite relaxation of tension.
Mary and Annie might, and actually did, barricade themselves on the third floor each night by putting a row of chairs on the staircase. But I know now that in most of the Crescent houses the attack on me was laid, either to a burglar after my grandmother’s silver in the cedar room or to my having run head-on into an open door!
That was due to Mrs. Talbot who, coming in early on the morning after it happened, had gone ponderously back to the guest wing and carefully inspected it.
“That’s what happened,” she boomed. “This door was open and she ran into it in the dark. My George did that once and had to have three stitches. Who on earth would want to hurt Louisa?”
“Louisa didn’t carry the kitchen poker up with her,” Mother said.
“How d’you know? Whose fingerprints were on it? I don’t know anything to hold a mark like a brass-handled poker.”
But the poker had borne no prints, it seemed; not even mine. Nor could she account for the fact that even if I had run into a door, the bump was on the top and toward the back of my head!
It was then to a Crescent still ignorant of this third tragedy and quietly going about its business, that Mother returned rather late that afternoon. Her mourning veil looked rather the worse for wear, but she herself looked better than I had seen her look for a long time. She had, it appeared, not only gone to the morgue. She had lunched alone downtown for the first time in twenty years; a break in her routine so incredible that I almost gasped.
“It was quite pleasant,” she said. “The chicken salad was much better than Mary’s; I must speak to her about it.”
“It was Holmes, wasn’t it, mother?”
She nodded, taking off her hat.
“Yes, it was Holmes. Of course his uniform is missing. I shall have to buy a new one. But he looked very natural, considering everything. Quite natural. A hit-and-run driver, they say. But I cannot help thinking, Louisa that he was taken by a definite act of Providence; and Mr. Sullivan quite agrees with me. You see—I suppose I can say this now—I had suspected something quite different. If Holmes killed Emily Lancaster—”
“We don’t know that it was Holmes, mother,” I said. “You may have been right, you know. At least you ought to tell somebody what you suspected, or whom. It can’t do any harm.”
But she refused with a gesture, and I could not induce her to tell me. In her mind the case was settled, the mystery solved. She was certain that he had killed Mrs. Lancaster before he took her on Thursday for her drive, and that all the family had been wrong about the time; and she was even more certain that on Sunday night he had escaped from a locked room and shot Miss Emily.
This belief of hers was strengthened rather than weakened by the fact that the Department had no record of Holmes’s fingerprints.
“You know, Louisa,” she said, “the police have said all along that the murderer was a non-habitual criminal, and I dare say they’ll find that he has that money out in that country place of his he used to talk about. It is all perfectly obvious.”
Outside of that one matter, of the suspicion which was now definitely and comfortably allayed, Mother was more garrulous that afternoon than I had ever seen her. Mr. Sullivan had taken her to see the Police Commissioner after they left the morgue, and she had been surprised to find that he was what she called a gentleman.
“Quite good-looking,” she said. “That is, he would have been, but he was suffering quite dreadfully from poison ivy. It seems he had got some on his hands and then rubbed his face. He was severely swollen. And he has very handsome offices. I suppose that is where our tax money goes. Then the District Attorney dropped in and we had a very nice talk.”
From which I gathered that Mother, rather pleased and certainly without suspecting it, had been that morning tactfully interrogated by the police!
Considering Mother since, in the light of that secret she so carefully preserved, I believe that she was as much a victim to the Crescent as its defender. It had done to her what it had done to most of us: it had definitely contracted our lives until it was a vital matter that in hot weather our candles be placed on ice before using so they would burn evenly on our dinner tables; or that our doilies be rolled over cones of old papers, and not folded.
Congresses might come and go, but it was still essential that our table napkins be ironed on the wrong side and then polished on the right side; that on certain dates our furs be brushed, sunned and put into domestic storage, and that on certain other days the process be repeated in reverse order.
Out in the world women were taking their places and living their own lives, but our small rules of living and conduct ignored all that. Our women servants still had to be in at ten and up at seven. Dependent women relatives were still cared for, if somewhat grudgingly; as witness Lydia Talbot. Mrs. Dalton, cutting flowers in her garden with her hands and complexion protected against the sun, was simply following the tradition; as was Mother when she served a glass of wine and a biscuit to one of our rare callers. And Mrs. Talbot might lock herself in to her heart’s content; it was her house and her affair.
Was it from this slavery of the unimportant that Emily Lancaster had tried to escape? That was the problem I carried into my room that afternoon, for if Emily had taken that money, it opened up something so dreadful that I was afraid to face it.
Suppose that Mrs. Lancaster had roused some night or other to find Emily drawing out that chest, or fumbling with its locks as it lay underneath the bed? And suppose then that the invalid had asked for Jim, the next day perhaps, to come and examine her hoard, to count it for her bag by bag and coin for coin as it lay on the bed? Then what? Was it so hard to suppose the rest? Hadn’t Lizzie Borden been accused of having killed her stepmother with an axe? And hadn’t our own grocer’s daughter turned on him a year ago and stabbed him in the neck with a knife, so that only the proximity of the hospital and assistance had saved his life?
I do not know when I have put in as utterly wretched an hour. All that I knew of Emily came back: the sacrifice of her life and of any real chance for marriage, and the possibility of some furious inner rebellion that had suddenly flared into desperate action. That was what Doctor Armstrong had said: “—to extreme violence. Even to murder.”
For she could have done it. I saw that clearly. She had had that half hour between three-thirty and four, for we had only her word that at three-forty-five she had opened her mother’s door and found her still asleep.
All of it, the plotting about the room on Liberty Avenue, the direct and indirect purchasing of
the weights, the conning of various steamship folders, pointed to long and careful planning and the expectation of escape. Then, with everything ready, she could not escape. The police watched her. The house was under guard. Even her own nerves betrayed her, for I had seen her myself in a state of utter collapse.
But I brought myself up with a jerk, for on Sunday night she herself had been killed.
She had not expected to be killed. She had gone downstairs and eaten an apple! Whatever guilt she may have felt, at least she apparently felt secure. Had eaten an apple and then wandered out into the warm night air. For all her complaints of someone trying to enter the house at night before her mother’s death, now quite calmly she started out. There were guards about, but no one saw or heard her.
What was she after, that Sunday night? The bird cage? Then what was in it? Did she keep, in a seed cup or under the sliding bottom, the keys to that hidden room of hers and to the Liberty Avenue house? That would explain a great deal, but not all. Perhaps the key to the chest had been there too, taken from her mother’s neck after the killing! They had found it not far from her body.
But then who had taken the bird cage? Was it Holmes?
It was possible, I thought. Almost certainly on that Thursday he already knew about the gold and where it was. But so far as he was concerned, the killing of Mrs. Lancaster did not help him, but rather hindered his plans. There was the chance of quick discovery that the money was gone, and also that Miss Emily would break down and confess. Yet he had made no immediate move to get the trunk. It was six days before he made that final and fatal move of his.
I went back to Emily. Was it Holmes on that Saturday night after her mother’s death, when someone had tried to enter Emily’s room from the porch roof, and she had escaped to the Talbot house? But she had seemed to know or suspect who the intruder was, or rather the intruders, for she had said: “Hide me, George. Hide me somewhere. They’re after me.”
She had known then, or guessed, who it was. She knew she was in danger, for all her locked bedroom door. Yet only the next night she had walked that path toward the Talbots’, and been shot.
My mind went back to Friday. It was on Friday night over the telephone that I had roused her from a heavy doped sleep with the word that there was someone on the roof; a man, apparently searching it with great care and some risk. Who was it, and what was he looking for? One thing was certain: he was capable of quick action, for in the interval between the ringing of the telephone bell and Margaret’s appearance in the cedar room with her father’s revolver, he had not only escaped. He had closed the trap door and replaced the ladder!
Perhaps I was oversuspicious as I looked back, but it did not ring entirely true, that story of Margaret’s as she had told it to me on Saturday morning. Why had this unknown, escaping somehow through a darkened house, not only managed to do that, but also to replace the trap and ladder?
I looked out at the Lancaster house. It might have been possible to climb from one of the third floor windows to the roof, but I doubted it. Then again, Margaret had asked me not to speak about it. The more I thought over that the stranger it seemed; unless at that time Margaret suspected Emily of her mother’s murder.
Was the man on the roof by any chance searching for the missing money? Or perhaps for the bloodstained garments of the killer for which the police had looked without result? They had to be somewhere, those clothes. There had been no chance for Emily, providing she was guilty, to have got rid of them.
But my mind kept going about in a circle, for after all Miss Emily herself had been killed only two nights later, and now even Holmes was gone.
I tried putting some of this down. I even tried repeating the chronology of that previous Thursday, for it was Mrs. Lancaster’s murder, I knew, that had started the entire chain. Yet that day had varied little from any other day, up to the time of the death. It was entirely usual for Lydia Talbot to carry Mrs. Lancaster some delicacy for her tray, and Lydia had left at half past two. At three-thirty Mr. Lancaster and Mrs. Talbot had gone; he had returned but under oath had stated that he had gone directly out again. At three-forty-five Emily reported her mother asleep, and at four o’clock Jim Wellington had found her dead.
When in all that closely checked time had the murderer, with or without a key to the house, been able to enter, kill and depart without discovery. And whom had Mother suspected of being both capable and able to do such a thing?
I sat back and thought about that; about that day when Mother, having read in the paper that the gold was missing, had instantly sent for Mrs. Talbot to apologize to her! Apology comes hard to Mother, and this apology seemed to have been for something she had thought rather than said. So far as I knew she had said nothing.
What had she thought? That Mrs. Talbot, after being a good friend and a kindly neighbor for years, had somehow reentered that house after Mr. Lancaster went for his walk, and killed a woman who was not only helpless, but who was related to her by marriage? She could have done it. It came to me almost with a shock that she could have done it easily.
Nobody had checked on her movements after she left the house. Even Miss Lydia was out and did not return until around five o’clock. As for motive, why demand one of a woman who was as definitely eccentric as she was? Or there might be one; a part of that hidden story to which Mother had now and then referred, something out of the past of which I had never heard, some ancient enmity carried secretly for years.
I sat back in my chair and tried to face that possibility. It was not credible, of course; but it is never credible that people willfully commit savage and brutal crimes. And as I sat there I realized that there was more than one point to support my suspicion. The shooting of Emily with what was apparently George Talbot’s automatic was only one of them.
I had remembered suddenly that there was a vine of poison ivy near the Talbot stable.
I sat then with my notes before me, staring incredulously out into the Lancasters’ sunny garden. Eben was cutting the grass again, and save for the notes on my lap it might have been the same Thursday afternoon the week before, when the Lancasters’ side door had opened, and Miss Emily had run out screaming and fallen flat on the newly-cut lawn.
As I looked I saw Jennie come out the side door and make a gesture to Eben. He stopped his mower at once, and something in the two attitudes told me that we had another death; that old Mr. Lancaster had drawn his last uneasy breath.
Chapter XXXV
THE POLICE IN THE meantime were subjecting Mrs. MacMullen to a severe grilling. Herbert Dean was there also, and it is his account which I am using.
They had found her in bed in a small hot back bedroom on an upper floor. She looked ill, he said. She had deep circles under her eyes, and she had evidently been crying. So pitiful an object was she that they tried being gentle with her; but at that she grew defiant and they had finally to change their tactics.
It was after that that she admitted she had known Holmes well, but she maintained stoutly that she had never suspected the Merriam woman’s identity, or that the stolen money might have been in the trunk.
“Why should I?” she demanded. “And if it comes to that, why would I go to that Hall girl this morning and tell her all I did, if I’d any idea of it? So far as I can see, all I had to do was to keep my mouth shut, and I was all right.”
“But you knew him pretty well?”
“Oh, I knew him all right. Not so well as you may think, but one of my daughters brought him here once or twice. I don’t know that I’d ever mentioned the Merriam woman to him at all; or her trunk either.”
“How did you explain his bringing you that word about it, if you knew he was the Halls’ driver?”
“I guess I might as well tell you,” she said, looking around at that ring of determined faces. “He’d been bootlegging a bit. Not much, but now and then, and so he knew a good many people. Nice people, too. When he walked up the steps and said Miss Merriam wanted her trunk that night it didn’t surprise
me. I just thought she’d seen him somewhere and asked him to bring the message. But I told him he’d have to bring the key to her door. She had a special lock on it.”
“And he brought the key?”
“He must have. He got in. I didn’t go upstairs to see.”
They got little further of any importance from her. She blamed a bootlegging gang for his death, and she insisted over and over that she had had no suspicion of what might lie in the trunk, although she admitted buying a certain number of boxes of dress weights for Miss Emily, who said her patient used them for potting flowers and weighting vases. Now and then too a heavy parcel arrived by express addressed to Miss Merriam, and was placed in the hall outside her door until she appeared.
“Once she said it was books, and I remember I said they’d be heavy reading, the way it took even to lift it. And another time she said she’d been having some old flat silver replated, and she showed me a spoon. But I wasn’t suspicious. If I watched all the queer things my roomers do I’d go crazy.”
“Yet you had read about the substitution of the dress weights for the gold, hadn’t you?”
“How on earth was I to connect this Lucy Merriam with the Lancaster family? Everybody knew they didn’t have a nurse.”
“This paper now, with the photograph. You were interested enough in these murders to put up a chain on your front door, and on the kitchen door too. But you never saw that picture until this morning. Is that your statement?”
“See here,” she said, raising herself in bed. “I’m not under arrest, am I? If I am, I’ll get a lawyer. If I’m not, you’ll take what I’m telling you I told you about that picture. Why should I have gone over to Crescent Place this morning, if I had anything to hide?”
And here I believe the Inspector smiled grimly.
“Well, you see, Mrs. MacMullen, the trunk was already gone, wasn’t it? And the money!”
It was onto this scene that without the slightest warning a new figure projected itself. The bedroom door opened and a girl rushed into the room, a pretty girl in a uniform with a thin summer coat over it, and with a face the color of chalk.
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